Two lanes on bridge across Shahdara drain to open in March

The Noida authority will open two lanes of a widened bridge across the Shahdara drain on Master Plan-2 Road near Film City next month. Officials said it will help ease traffic congestion on the stretch.

The Noida authority will open two lanes of a widened bridge across the Shahdara drain on Master Plan-2 Road near Film City next month. Officials said it will help ease traffic congestion on the stretch.(Sunil Ghosh/HT Photo)

The Noida authority will open two lanes of a widened bridge across the Shahdara drain on Master Plan-2 Road near Film City next month. Officials said it will help ease traffic congestion on the stretch.

The bridge connects Sector 16A and Garden Galleria Mall in Sector 38A, where there is a high footfall of motorists, particularly those who come for shopping in malls in Sector 38A and Sector 18, besides thousands of office-goers, who get delayed at this bottleneck.

The situation worsens during the peak hour traffic. “Work on additional two lanes of the carriageway of the bridge near Garden Galleria Mall has almost finished. The stretch across the bridge is likely to be completed by mid-March. The civil work on the project is nearly complete. We are giving finishing touches to the flanks of the widened bridge,” Deepak Agarwal, CEO of the Noida authority, said.

“As soon as the flanks are in place, we will integrate these with the bridge for smooth traffic movement,” Agarwal said.

To streamline traffic flow and to provide a signal-free corridor for those moving to Noida from Delhi and vice-versa, the Noida authority had already opened two lanes (on the other side, between Film City and Mall of India) across the same bridge in October 2016.

Officials said that commuters using the Master Plan –2 Road, which connects Film City to Sector 18 via the bridge over the Shahdara drain, will get relief from repeated traffic gridlocks at the narrow bridge near the Film City flyover.

The Master Plan-2 Road is also known as the Maharaja Agrasen Marg.

Work on widening the bridge was started in December 2015. The project was aimed at widening the existing four-lane bridge to turn it into an eight-lane bridge.

“The aim is to decongest the area in the vicinity of Sector 18 market and two leading malls, where high traffic density is witnessed. Also, the entry and exit points of Noida need to be free of congestion,” an official said.

The traffic flow to Delhi via the DND Flyway, towards East Delhi via Noida entry point near Sector 14A and to Greater Noida will become smoother, officials said.